X Descending (39 page)

This document was not approved for release until January 2, 1981, but is now available in several places online and through the Freedom of Information Act.

It is my hope that this information is useful to anyone wanting to know more about the strange vehicles at the core of the UFO phenomenon. Even I find it easy to become disillusioned when I see information being presented on television or reprinted in books and magazines that is made up of fantastic claims for which there is little to no substantive evidence. Nevertheless, anyone who looks closely will find many cases like the Socorro incident that clearly indicate physically real vehicles—with a high degree of strangeness—have been, and continue to be, seen by honest, reliable witnesses.

Appendix D

Propulsion Concept Inspired By Mystery Aircraft

(Originally submitted to Popular Mechanics)

For decades, researchers have sought ways to alleviate the more troubling aspects of traveling at extreme speeds. Aerodynamics and thermodynamics become a problem as shock waves form, and sonic booms pose major problems for both civilian and military aviation. Physical aerodynamics can only go so far in the extreme ranges of supersonic and hypersonic speeds (beyond Mach 5-6) and engineers have continually looked for alternatives.

As early as the 1950s, it was known that a physical spike extending from the tip of a nose cone could change the shape of a shock wave. From the late 1950s and into the 1970s researchers also studied the effects of adding heat ahead of a body in a supersonic flow as a means of reducing these effects. A more elegant solution would be to simply move the atmosphere out of the way in advance, and the past ten years, scientists have been studying a new concept to accomplish exactly this.

In hypersonic shock tunnels, researchers have successfully shown that concentrated energy beams can cause the hypersonic flow to expand around test models reducing both drag and heating effects. But what has not been widely known, is that this new concept had its inspiration in a film taken of a highly advanced and previously unseen aircraft.

Knowledgeable sources reveal that the film of this aircraft was taken in the southern United States and shows a vehicle projecting a pulsing energy beam ahead of it as it moves in the atmosphere. They admit being baffled as to who might have built the aircraft, but descriptions of what is visible in photographs indicate startling technological advances. Visible detail in the film images indicate a disc-shaped vehicle creating some form of visible ionization pulsed rapidly from a superstructure centered on the forward facing surface.

Since 1993 researchers have been studying ways of producing directed energy for modifying shock effects. Initial tests to validate the concept, termed a Directed Energy Air Spike (DEAS), were performed at RPI in Troy, New York, with energy produced at the tip of a physical spike mounted in the center of a small test model. Previous experiments have typically used models of blunt-bodies or more conventional aircraft shapes but, in these recent tests, the model has been a small lenticular disc similar in shape to a discus thrown by Olympic athletes. Recent experiments performed at the Laboratory of Aerothermodynamics and Hypersonics-CTA in São José dos Campos, Brazil, using a similar disc-shaped model, demonstrated the use of a CO2 laser to optically break down the hypervelocity flow upstream of the model. But particularly intriguing is the position of the model during tests—mounted on edge, one flat surface faces into the direction of the hypersonic flow. Images taken during the recent Brazilian test are said to display striking similarities to the mysterious aircraft in the reported photographs.

Beginning in the late 1980s, research into laser or microwave energy for propulsion has focused primarily on launching small satellites into orbit. Experimental models, small and extremely lightweight, had to be designed specifically for this purpose. This was due in part to the general lack of availability of sufficiently powerful lasers to do more than merely prove the concept works. Space and weight requirements notwithstanding, none of these early designs called for using directed energy projected ahead of the vehicle.

In 1995, illustrations began to appear showing revolutionary lenticular-shaped transatmospheric vehicles using directed energy beams to reduce drag and thermal effects. One of the first illustrations of the “air spike” concept appeared with an article in the September 1995 issue of
Popular Mechanics
magazine. A more recent example appears on NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center Advanced Space Transportation website, and on the cover of
Space Manufacturing 12
, published by the Space Studies Institute. A particularly beautiful illustration has been produced by Media Fusion, Inc. and can be found on their website. While these designs are considered radical, and at best still remain decades in the future, the reported similarities to the aircraft in the photographs, in particular the forward facing energy beam, suggests that researchers may have drawn on ideas gleaned from an aircraft apparently already in production.

Designs for disc-shaped aircraft have appeared from time to time, though, to date, no practical working aircraft have ever been rolled out for public display. Perhaps best known is the infamous AVRO-disc, which, despite several intriguing conceptual illustrations, turned out to be a relatively poor hovercraft. But these past designs always depicted the vehicle in a typical horizontal mode, perhaps because the aerodynamics seemed obvious. As tests of the DEAS concept continue to demonstrate, it now appears that the on-edge configuration, in combination with a beam of energy directed into the atmosphere ahead of the vehicle, may provide radically new aerodynamic capabilities.

Just as perplexing as who may have engineered this groundbreaking aircraft is the question of what form of propulsion it uses and how it generates the observed energy beam. Current beamed energy propulsion concepts would ultimately require earth-based or space-based power stations transmitting energy to vehicles as they travel in the atmosphere. Whether from above or below, a substantial infrastructure would need to be in place to maintain a vehicle in flight. Researchers studying the DEAS concept are presently concentrating on means of focusing energy at a point ahead of their test models in order to generate the amount of energy required to effect hypersonic flows. But, according to sources, the film of this unknown aircraft show it projecting a narrow concentrated beam that extends for some distance ahead. Filmed traveling at a relatively low altitude and, for a time, on a horizontal trajectory, this aircraft appeared capable of varying its speed. It is unclear whether the pulsing energy beam alone could explain all these observed flight dynamics.

Is this mysterious aircraft a product of Area 51, the Lockheed “Skunkworks”, or some vestige of the Soviet aerospace program? Perhaps the Chinese, only recently achieving manned space flight, have managed to leapfrog Western engineers in aircraft design. Even the most state-of-the-art designs are generally recognizable as being evolutionary steps in vehicular engineering, not revolutionary, as seems to be the case here. It is difficult to imagine a revolutionary aircraft being designed and built these days without some news of its existence leaking long before it appeared in broad daylight. As yet there has been no indication of who is behind this startling aircraft, or any word from normal sources of aviation and aerospace industry news. The Air Force and NASA have both shown interest in the DEAS concept and have sponsored much of the research into it and its potential uses. What that implies about their knowledge of the mysterious aircraft remains to be seen.

CHAPTER 2

  1  
“Brigadier General William R. Brooksher,”Air Force Link, 24 Sep. 2008 .

  2  
Robert Salas and James Klotz,
Faded Giant
(BookSurge Publishing, 2005), 46.

  3  
William Moore & Jaime Shandera,
The MJ-12 Documents
, (Fair Witness Project, 1990), 15-17.

CHAPTER 6

  4  
Gregory Pope, “Fly By Microwave,”
Popular Mechanics
(Sept. 1995).

CHAPTER 7

  5  
L.N. Myrabo et al., “Apollo Lightcraft Project,”
NASA Technical Reports Server
, Oct. 2005, 23 Sep. 2008, .

CHAPTER 9

  6  
S. Kandero, “Air Spike Could Ease Hypersonic Flight Problems,”
AW&ST
(May 15, 1995), 66-67

  7  
G.A. Nyberg et al., Performance Analysis of a Laser-Powered SSTO Shuttlecraft,”
AAS
87-130
, 24 Sep. 2008, .

  8  
Paula M. Powell, “CO2 Lasers Expose Hypersonic Flow,”
Accent on
Applications
, Jul. 2003, 24 Sep. 2008, .

CHAPTER 10

  9  
Interview with Ray Stanford, Virtually Strange Network, #234, 29 Mar. 2003, .

CHAPTER 11

10  
Jim Wilson, “NASA’s Antigravity Machine,”
Popular Mechanics
, Dec. 1997, 24 Sep. 2008,.

11  
Evgeny Podkletnov et al., “Impulse Gravity Generator Based on Charged Y Ba2Cu3O7−y Superconductor with Composite Crystal Structure”
Cornell University Library
, 20 Aug. 2001, 24 Sep. 2008, .

12  
Giovanni Modanese and Chris Y. Taylor, “Evaluation of an Impulse Gravity Generator Based Beamed Propulsion Concept,” 5 Sep. 2002, 24 Sep. 2008, .

13  
Tim Ventura, “The Podkletnov Gravitational Shield,”
American Antigravity
, 24 Sep. 2008, .

14  
Yu. Kolesnichenko et al., “Microwave Energy Release Regimes for Drag Reduction in Supersonic Flows”
AIAA Paper 2002-0353
.

15  
Yu. Kolesnichenko et al., “MW Energy Deposition for Aerodynamic Application,”
AIAA Paper 2003-361
.

16  
M.N. Shneider et al., “Steady and Unsteady Supersonic Flow Control With Energy Addition,”
AIAA Paper 2003-3862
.